this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Vote manipulation bots using sh.itjust.works? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by farcaster@lemmy.world to c/main@sh.itjust.works
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Hi just a heads up. Check out this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37758799

It got so many upvotes in a such a short time I checked out its activity from an mbin instance. And most of these upvotes are coming from sh.itjust.works accounts which were all created 2 months ago, most on 2/16, and have never posted/commented. There was a similar post in the lemmy.world/c/world community linking to the same website and having a similarly high number of upvotes within minutes, but that post seems to be gone now.

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[โ€“] ThreeJawedChuck@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

to get the ball rolling usually yeah

I've always been a little skeptical of the up/downvote mechanism on any social media platform. It makes it so easy to weaponize the human bias towards group conformity, by doing exactly what you described.

I won't try to argue the voting has no benefits. It can be helpful to reduce the reach of truly bad faith posts for example, and everyone loves the little dopamine hit of seeing one's own posts upvoted - me included. Just that it also has real drawbacks, and I'm not sure whether the good outweighs the bad.

[โ€“] Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

I may be more willing to be skeptical. I'm not sure if the reduction in bad faith is really worth the downsides of vote ranking myself.

If SomethingAwful can survive to this day without it and an intact strong community identity, I think it comes down to the usual things that tip the scales heaviest of all things considered: Site ownership, moderators. A sense of humour doesn't hurt either.